Posts Tagged ‘rockstar’

“Our apologies to PC gamers worldwide who have been counting down the days until the launch of the game, but a bit more time is needed to ensure that the game is as polished as possible, and to make certain that both Heists and the GTA Online experience are ready to roll out on day one for PC. As a gesture of thanks for your understanding, we will grant anyone who has pre-ordered the game an additional $200,000 in-game cash for use in GTA Online.”

The new release date is April 14th. The next release date is unknown at this time.

Every Sunday, we reach deep into Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s 141-year history to pull out one of the best moments from the archive. This week, Adam’s 2012 article singing the praises of videogame cities which are more than mere reconstruction, but are built from the bricks and mortar of ideas.

I’ve been visiting various cities recently, which always fill me with confusion and wonder, then Dishonored made me think about how much I miss Looking Glass. Put the two together and this happens. Join me in a meandering word-search for cohesion and theme in the use of the city across Thief, and the selected works of Rockstar and Charles Dickens. Be warned, there are spoilers for all three Thief games.

You might have noticed Steam downloading a sizeable update for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas over the weekend and wondered what that was about. A fancy secret tying into GTA V’s return to the west coast, perhaps? Not quite. The patch added support for XInput controllers like the Xbox 360 pad, which is nice, but also removed seventeen songs from various radio stations. No more angsting out and gunning it across Gant Bridge in the wrong lane listening to Killing in the Name, I’m afraid. It breaks old saves for some too, though a mod fixes that up.

It’s awfully exciting. I’ve played squillions of first-person games and, thanks to mods, even first-person Grand Theft Auto. And yet, here I am, oohing and aahing like a weary traveller handed a cup of tea. The new trailer showing off Grand Theft Auto V‘s first-person mode is awfully exciting.

Not just that it’s gorgeous – it is – but that it’s surely a sign that Rockstar recognise GTA is a tourism simulator at heart, and intend to do away with all this guff about Johnny Crimes and his pals Ricky Murder and Ian Knives. GTA VI’s final mission will be to find a good vegan breakfast on a foggy San Fierro morning, mark my words.

“Where’s Grand Theft Auto V PC?” we once wailed. “Where oh where oh where could it be? Why haven’t they announced it?” Then Saints Row IV came out and we were distracted by the realisation that maybe superpowers were more fun than super-serious. But then hey, GTA V came out on consoles, and we peered over shoulders and muttered “Yeah, okay, sure, I’d play that. Why haven’t they announced it for PC?” The answer’s very simple: because it wasn’t pretty enough yet.

Grand Theft Auto V will arrive on PC this autumn, prettier than ever, Rockstar have finally announced at E3 this year.

Eurogamer has multiple sources who say Grand Theft Auto 5 will be coming out on the PC in 2014. GTAV (pronounced ‘gitav’) is of course the biggest video game thing of ever, and I’ve enjoyed bits of it on the tellybox (but there is a huge amount of fiddly crap – honestly, both the single and multiplayer modes really love forcing you into tedious tasks). I would welcome it if it came to the PC, so if the multiple unnamed people chatting to Eurogamer are correct, then I will allow this.Read the rest of this entry »

Goodness gracious, Grand Theft Auto Online sounds like quite the thing. While Grand Theft Auto IV’s multiplayer presented quite a sizable playground for nos-fueled deathmatch antics, it was just that: a playground, and nothing more. Grand Theft Auto Online’s Los Santos, meanwhile, looks like it’s trying very, very hard to be an actual place – replete with its own characters, missions, silly side activities (synchronized rainbow parachuting, anyone?), and beefed up progression. Also, Rockstar plans to continually expand what almost certainly constitutes the most crime-ridden city on Fictional Earth long after launch.

To the anger of Dr Zoidberg, I’m attempting to retain an air nonchalance about GTA V. If it doesn’t come out then I can pretend I was cool about it, but if it is announced then I can break for cover and hug the nearest person to me. That could be you, btw. But that fact is the console version is out in September and nothing has been announced for the PC, so there will be some sort of delay. But a small glimmer of hope has emerged on the possibility of it coming to the PC this autumn, via an Nvidia investor call.

OK, maybe not officially, but modders are ensuring that Grand Theft Auto IV continues to sprout bells and whistles like a million retail chains the second Christmas shopping season starts. It’s become remarkably more attractive, gained entire landmasses, and received the most important upgrade of all: Iron Man. But that’s not enough. It can never be enough. So modders have taken to grandly thieving Grand Theft Auto V’s features and cramming them under GTA IV’s hood. First up: cross-city character-swapping.

On behalf of RPS, I’d like to offer an apology. You may have noticed that we haven’t joined every other gaming blog, Twitter feed, Facebook page, Vine, easily graffiti-ed wall, bus, building, tree, and organized crochet ring in plastering all our available surfaces with each and every Grand Theft Auto V screenshot to hit these mean e-streets. It is, I’m well aware, a travesty. But hey, it looks like Rockstar’s in the market for someone to speed its PC porting process along a little, so I think I care again. Sort of. I mean, the game’s world looks marvelous, expansive, and varied, but – as ever – this one’s grandly thieving fingers are sticky largely because they can’t keep out of film’s painfully predictable pie. Trailer’s after the break.

There will be a new GTA game soon. Maybe it’ll be on PC. It has three characters, all of which are violent, sweary men. It has some improvements to the graphics. It’s spent a lot on music and voice-acting. It has the same sort of gags as the last dozen GTA games/expansions, but with different words. It really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really wants to be a movie.

Here are three new trailers, cunningly combined into one, and focusing exclusively on the story rather than on what you get to do. With crushing, miserable inevitability, there is a strip club scene, because there is always a strip club scene. IGN or someone will have a shot-by-shot analysis any second now, but you can watch the plain old videos below if you really want to.Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s something I never thought of when playing LA Noire. Whatever its other merits and failings, the stuff it does with facial animation and performance capture was amazing, and something the whole industry can benefit from presuming it’s not drowning in a thousand million unbreakable patents (which it probably is). However, all it was being used for was to, essentially, just achieve a slightly better version of something games and especially their cutscenes already did. We can find rehearsed, scripted dialogue and, to wildly varying degrees, attendant facial emotion and animation, all over the place. What we can’t find is naturalistic, unrehearsed performances – people being people, as opposed to be people being videogame characters. Take a look at this to see how big the difference can be.Read the rest of this entry »